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bogomipz,

Regarding shared libraries, I've often wondered this myself. Shared libraries are the cause of all dependency problems, but is there really that much of a net benefit?

I think maybe when RAM was extremely tight, the answer may have been yes. But these days, they may be of less value, we really ought to test our hypothesis.

Consider, that shared libraries can't be optimized over API calls. It might take 30 bytes to call a libc function, which shifts the bytes around again to do a syscall. In a static application, it could theoretically optimize away all the glue code to do a syscall directly while saving space.

Obviously we have to look at bigger libraries too, like libjpg, but even there I wonder how much space would be wasted if it were statically compiled.

This isn't to preclude to the use of shared libraries for applications which are genuinely related and deployed together. But I do see an awful lot of application specific libraries under /lib which have to be managed in lockstep with their associated application, why should these be shared libraries at all?